Figuring out how to control anger issues in your relationship can be challenging. Everyone gets mad. Some of us even blow up.
Controlling anger issues in a relationship means blowing up less often and learning how to minimize the damage when, despite our best efforts, an episode occurs after all.
Having an argument with the person we love is one of the most difficult events we can go through in a relationship. When we are not upset, our special person is our favorite individual. We love them. When we get our feelings hurt, or we get misunderstood or get angry at them, they turn from our loving soulmate to someone we war with.
And when we get pulled into an argument with our loved one it doesn’t matter what came before the argument. It doesn’t matter that we get along most of the time. It doesn’t matter that we had a great day just a few minutes before. All that matters is that we are hurt, feel unloved and now we are MAD!
I know every time I am feeling good and I say yes to something I always feel better. It’s as if good positive energy becomes bigger. I noticed this recently when I was reading an article about humans and their pets.
A recent study talked about how when pet owners look into the eyes of their pet, both animal and human get a dose of the pleasure hormone in their bodies. That hormone is called dopamine. And it happens naturally when we are engaged with our pet at a deep level.
When we think of saying I love you to someone we certainly don’t think that I am sorry belongs in the same category. In our heads they seem far apart. One is an expression of our truest most wonderful feelings for a special person. The other is said when we think we might have hurt someone and we want to make it better.
So what would tie the two together? Before we see the connection I want to talk about how we learn each concept. The loving sentiment we might have heard from our parents when we were small. We might have heard them say, “I love you.” We might have been encouraged as children to say it to others, maybe grandparents or other relatives, and we probably heard it from them. We learn this is a good thing to say. Maybe we learn it’s just for families.
It would be helpful if all of us in relationships knew exactly what love is supposed to feel like. If we knew, then we would know if we were in love or if we weren’t. We wouldn’t wonder about it. As a couples specialist I work with a lot of people in relationships who are often not sure about the love they feel.
Some people will be very angry at their mate and tell me all the things the partner does to make them pull their hair out. Then I ask the same person, “Do you think about ending the relationship?” Then they scold me as if I haven’t been listening and then they tell me, “I can’t leave, I love him.”
Learning how to handle conflict in a relationship is tough, because it forces us to challenge our instincts.
When people get their feelings hurt, most of us don’t want to go near the person who hurt them. This holds true in families, with co-workers and in relationships. It’s just easier to back away when something painful happens. It’s just the way many humans are wired.
As a couples specialist I know that even with the person we love, for some of us it’s instinctive to pull away when things get messy. I work with people who love each other who just want to know what to do when they fight. They usually wonder if they could do the fighting part better so they don’t have to stay wounded and apart for so long.
As a relationship guide, I spend a lot of time simplifying the most important elements that make a good relationship. The more I teach, the more concise it gets. And I think I have it boiled down to just three parts, three important ingredients to help your relationship thrive.
While they are few in number, the steps might be considered challenging as they require a lot of thought, patience, and trust. The thought part is you thinking about the parts and actually deciding to make yourself do the work. The patience is not expecting to get things right all at once, to be able to allow yourself to develop new positive behaviors in the time it takes. The trust is so you will believe in yourself when you doubt your progress and remind yourself that you can indeed do this.
It happens to all of us. We hold on to our thoughts and don’t say them because we are afraid of hurting the other person’s feelings. We stuff them down inside and just stay silent. We may grouse about them later with someone else, but most of the time a lot of us don’t speak up.
If this sounds like you, you are not alone. This is one of the most common themes I come across while helping people in counseling. Most people are aware they do this, and they are not sure how to change it because it’s something they have always done…put their feelings aside and take care of the other person first.
Many people struggle with taking responsibility in a relationship. They feel victimized, they blame, and they feel miserable. It doesn’t have to be this way.
One of the hardest things I see couples struggle with is the idea that each person in the relationship is responsible for his or her own part of the problems that surround them. It’s not uncommon for people to want to blame the other person for how they feel as if the partner did something to cause the upset. Something bad happens and people start pointing fingers at the other person.
I was thinking about acceptance the other day and was realizing that this is a practice that might take a long time to get good at, especially when we are talking about relationships. You see, all of us pretty much like who we are. We like how we think, how we behave and act. We like our ways.
And many of us get really perturbed when our partner doesn’t agree with us. They might do something different than what we learned growing up. Or they might like something arranged differently then how we prefer. They might even say things we would never say.